Current (https://current.org/2006/10/page/4/)
John Whiting reviews Uneasy Listening, Matthew Lasar’s latest chronicle of the battles within Pacifica Radio. “As the backroom plots continually recycle, the story begins to read like an endless reality-TV pirate game in which the protagonists are made to walk the plank and then try to get voted back on board,” he writes.
The Los Angeles Times profiles Tavis Smiley: “In an era where Jay Leno and David Letterman use guests as comedy fodder and Charlie Rose has become a courtier to the barons of the Eastern media elite, Smiley is a reminder of the days when talk show hosts were conversationalists, not sycophants or joke meters.”
National Review Online blogger Stephen Spruiell comes to Kenneth Tomlinson’s defense, urging fellow conservatives not to “stay silent while Democrats tear down Tomlinson’s reputation just because he’s a conservative.”
The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher profiles NPR’s Radio Lab, which enters its second season this fall. “. . . [T]here is a music to these nonfiction stories, a beat and a rhythm that feel fresh, and that’s something that good old public radio dearly needs,” he writes.
The future of KCEP-FM in Las Vegas is in doubt as the station’s parent organization, the Economic Opportunity Board, struggles with a debt of $1.9 million, reports the city’s Review-Journal. “We’re being sued by a sausage company,” says the EOB’s executive director. “That was definitely a low point.”